Reid All About It!

Civitas, 7 February 2007

John Reid, in honour of little known and even lesser practiced ‘Safer Internet Day’, has launched another barrage of verbal torpedoes over the issue of sex offenders using the Internet. The plan is to force released sex offenders to register their online identities (email addresses and usernames) with the government so that their communications with others including children can be tracked and dangerous behaviour ‘flagged’ before anything in the real world takes place. Unfortunately, both the strategy and implementation of this place seems to be based on little more than one or two ‘Paedofinder General’ sketches from the television series Monkey Dust.

We should note initially the ingenious way that the government draws up voices of support from apparently independent sources to bolster its position. NCH comes in faithfully to describe Reid’s ideas as a good move, but as a recent Civitas report has found, with NCH gaining 88% of its funding from the state, that source is now around as independent as a Home Office press officer. This echo chamber of state-dependent voices allows the phenomenon of a consensus to coalesce without the need for an actual debate on the efficacy and costs of a new policy.
The pivot of the whole policy is that sex offenders (and we can only assume Reid is referring to convicted paedophiles specifically) will be monitored on the Internet using their online identities in the same way as they are when interacting in public.
The problem is that online identities are interchangeable and new ones can be created instantly. The government will have to rely on convicted sex offenders either using the same email and chat-room usernames as registered or informing the Home Office every time they open a new email account. This system is highly reliant on convicted criminals being extremely compliant in a way that is nearly impossible to check up on and since the methods of ‘flagging’ up potential re-offenders rely on that same initial compliance, the whole idea is fundamentally unenforceable. Unless sex offenders are unusually honest criminals, of course.
The other risk is of false positives developing. Old online identities sometimes expire and are re-opened by different, entirely independent people. Suddenly someone, by his or her unfortunate choice of username, may find themselves being hunted down by the police when, according to the government’s data, someone they are monitoring has suddenly switched IP address, perhaps to a different county. It is not as if the government has demonstrated the competence to work with single identities in the first place, as Home Office checks have had similar problems of denying perfectly legitimate and able people from working with children on the grounds that they have a similar name to someone on List 99.
The inevitable confusion will be blamed on the messiness of the Internet itself, the fact that people can have a dozen identities and create a new one in seconds. That people can be as open or as anonymous as they want. That the Internet is actually safer than real life (in that no one can actually hurt you physically, and people can only ever know whatever personal information you choose to tell them) will go unnoticed. This free unmonitored association works against everything the government stands for. So for the sake of protecting our lives easier, the Home Office could next suggest that everyone should have one email address for conducting their business (then it can be imprinted on our ID card!). After all, you haven’t got anything to hide? Have you?
The real solution is rather less glamorous than setting up new agencies to police the information superhighway. It involves leaving people alone, both in public and in private. Yes, even convicted child molesters who have served their time in prison. The government should not blur the distinction between the free citizen and the convict criminal so haphazardly by creating different levels of surveillance for people they suspect of involvement in crime. Instead, when properly convicted by a jury in a court via due process of a serious crime with an established victim, such as child molestation or abuse or rape or murder, criminals should be put in prison for a long sentence. If it is judged that some of these individuals have no potential to be rehabilitated, then they should spend the rest of their natural lives in prison. That will protect the public, while only reducing the freedoms of those guilty of crime. Unfortunately, this is the last thing that the government intends as a solution at the moment.